Honesty lasts longest. A German proverb, and the argument in it is about duration rather than virtue. It does not say honesty is right. It says honesty is what survives — which is the same argument the culture makes about agreements, prices and partnerships.
The jug and the well
The jug goes to the well until it breaks. A German proverb about repeated advantage-taking. The jug does not break because of any single trip. It breaks because the trips continued past the point where they should have stopped, and nobody was counting.
Trade and change
Trade and change — a fixed German pairing for commercial life as a whole, in use since the Middle Ages. The rhyme yokes commerce to movement and mutual dealing. It describes trade as something that circulates between people rather than as something extracted by one from another.
It has to add up for both
A deal has to work out for both sides. Said flatly in German business, as a statement of how transactions function rather than as an appeal to decency. Rechnen is the verb for calculating. The claim is arithmetical: a bargain that does not add up for one party will not hold.
Right and fair
Right and fair. A fixed German pairing, and billig here is not the modern word for cheap. It is the older sense: equitable, proportionate, what is due. The drift of billig from fair to cheap is one of the more telling movements in the German language, and the old meaning survives only in this phrase and in the law.
To over-advantage
To over-advantage. A single German verb for taking more than your due from a transaction. It sits in ordinary speech and in legal drafting alike. There is no neutral English verb for it — to get a better deal carries no fault, and übervorteilen carries nothing else.
Pulled across the table
To pull someone across the table. The German phrase for getting the better of a counterpart in a way that is not legitimate. The image is physical and one-sided. Someone has been moved from their position by force rather than by argument, and the table — the place where the negotiation happened — is what they were dragged over.
At eye level
At eye level. The German phrase for a relationship between parties of equal standing, and the standard description of how a negotiation ought to be conducted. It is a physical claim about posture. Neither party is looking up or down.
Co-determination
Mitbestimmung. German law gives employees seats on the supervisory boards of large companies — half the seats in firms over two thousand employees. The structure assumes that an outcome reached without one side represented is not a legitimate outcome, and builds that into company law.
The principle of equivalence
Das Äquivalenzprinzip. The principle of equivalence — that what each side gives should correspond to what each side receives. It is not an aspiration in German law. It is a working concept that courts apply, and a disturbed equivalence is a ground for intervention.